Welcome to the Frederick Faith Debate on Frederick's News Radio, 930 WFMD, brought to us by All Shred, Mobile Document Destruction, shredding today for growth tomorrow, and Putman Plumbing and Heating, how can we make you smile? I'm Troy Skinner, on the panel this week, Bob Miller, host of the Morning News Express, right here on WFMD. Hello there. Four years running, Frederick's most favorite radio personality, as voted by the readers of Frederick Magazine, and Pastor John Schweitzer from Crossroads Valley Chapel, and I don't think he's ever been voted favorite anything, actually. My wife thinks I'm the favorite in her life. Well, you've got to remember, he was voted by the board, right, to be hired? By the Board of Education? Well, no, I mean, I don't know how you were hired. Did you start the church on your own? Right? My people, my church, I mean... Yeah, they had to vote. Actually, but the listeners have voted. WFMD is... The most listened to radio program on WFMD on Sundays is the Phredic Faith Debate. Golf clap. And behind only Chris Murray's show on Saturday and the Frederick Forum with Blaine Young on Saturday, other than those two shows, Frederick Faith Debate, according to Arbitron, has more listeners than any other show all weekend long on WFMD. Blaine, we're coming after you. That's right, baby. Wait a minute, you're supposed to be a Christian. That's right. We can't be competitive. He can heal, Blaine. That's right. We bind up and we hurt. Every once in a while I like to clear out the email archives and get caught up on some stuff because we haven't had the ability to do that online until just recently. You can now check WFMD.com and there is a link for the Frederick Faith Debate. You can get to it two different ways. You can go to the weekend lineup and click on the Faith Debate and get to the page there, or there's a little drop-down menu on the home page for programs and you can click on the Faith Debate there. You can also click on the link for Bob's blog. That's right. The Morning News Express page. And for your Bobcasts. And the Bobcasts. Anyway, so we'll probably get a faith cast. A faith cast. Yeah. That doesn't work as well, though. I know. Bob cast is cool. Yeah, Bob cast sounds good. I didn't come up with it, so. So we'll probably do some of this house cleaning kind of stuff on the website, but we're not quite up to speed on all that yet. But I would have done this on the air anyway. because somebody took the time to send a nice, thoughtful, not lengthy, but there's a number of words there, right? That's a couple hundred words anyway. Yeah, three or four paragraphs. All right. If you were listening to the show, I think it was in January, we did a series of shows with a woman who was a professing atheist. And in doing the show, we found out or it was discovered that part of her spiritual background and part of what influences her spiritual worldview isn't a pure, absolute atheism. She's got a little Buddhism that's kind of mixed in. And so we ended up spending... Which is kind of a natural connection. Yeah, one could argue, and we did on that show. Others would probably disagree with you. Actually, I don't know anybody that would disagree with that. That Buddhism and atheism are the same thing? No, no, no. Atheists would say that they feel most comfortable with Buddhism as a spiritual approach to, you know, as their approach, as a potential approach to spirituality. And most Buddhists would say that they feel like it's a very scientific, you know, orientation, if they've thought about those kinds of things. If they haven't thought about it, then they won't make the connection. But those that are willing to think about connections between faith and science tend to make that connection. Well, since they're not here to challenge you, I'm going to say, well said. See, I would have thought he would have done the opposite. He would have challenged you. I'll move on for the interest of the show. So if you've caught on to kind of a rhythm and a pattern on this show, you might have noticed that we have a tendency to do things in fours. Yeah. We have a tendency to do a series of four on a topic with a guest or whatever. So anyway, after doing three shows with our atheist guest, and you'll have to forgive me, I wish I could remember her name, but in the moment, it's eluding me. It'll come to me when the show's over, I'm sure, but right now it's eluding me. But we did three shows on her atheism, and then thought, you know what? There's an awful lot of Buddhism that's popping its head up here and there. And she seemed to want to talk about it. So we said, let's do a final show and talk about how Buddhism has influenced your spiritual views and your worldview. So anyway, in response to that show, somebody who listened and hopefully got an Arbitron book, no, I'm just kidding, wrote to me and said, Mr. Skinner, It can never be good when it starts that way, right? Mr. Skinner. I heard your show the other day about Christianity and Buddhism, which sounded more like Christianity versus Buddhism, and I was a little disappointed. I am a high school history teacher in Maryland, and my brother is a high school religious studies teacher in San Francisco. We were both raised Catholic, and though I have left the church for more Buddhist practices, My brother is still a practicing Catholic but also practices Buddhism as well. He has written many articles and is about to be published on topics such as walking a Christian path in Buddhist tradition. He would have been a much more qualified guest to have that discussion on both sides of the issue since sides were taken. Nothing you said really annoyed me. He's talking about me, the voice of reason. Nothing that I, Troy Skinner, said annoyed this person. I want the record to be clear. Yes, it's clear. Although he did qualify it. Nothing you said really annoyed me as much as the male guest you had on the Christian side. And by the way, that male guest was Jonathan Schweitzer, pastor of Crossroads Valley Chapel. That's me. Without going into too much in this email, I felt two major things were wrong with the discussion. First, the male guest, John Switzer, you had on turned the discussion into a validity contest, which is laughable. And the female guest you had was constantly being interrupted and talked over like so many male-dominated talk shows do to women already. Also, I wonder if she was qualified enough to respond to some of the ridiculous comparisons and responses the male guest was making. It was like listening to a high school argument about whose religion was better. A final point, I hope you would pass on to your male guest one major difference between a Christian and a Buddhist. A Buddhist would not, one, raise his voice or talk over someone so aggressively as he did, and two, would not have been so judgmental about the whole discussion, but quite the opposite, having much respect for Jesus Christ. I feel he showed very little respect towards Siddhartha Gautama. Gautama. Siddhartha Gautama. I'm sure Jonathan said that right. He's the original Buddha. I said it wrong. Yeah, yeah. A very simple and peaceful teacher, like Jesus, who came 600 years later. Thank you for your time. Now, do we want to go through these point by point? Do you have a general response you'd like to make? I have a general response I'd like to make, but maybe you want to go first. It's up to you. Either way is fine. Yeah. Go ahead. Why don't you go ahead? Because he really kind of goes after you. So I want to give you a chance to really respond the way that you think you should. But part of this is also a critique that's pointed at you, but should have been pointed at the show. If you're not a regular listener to the show, you wouldn't know this, and this person probably tuned in the very first time, probably the first time, because he didn't know your name, and he wasn't clear on certain things we do on this show. Jonathan wasn't making it a Buddhism versus Christianity discussion. I was, because that's what the show is. It's the Frederick Faith debate. You take up this point of view, the other person takes up that point of view, and you go at it, and you have a debate. And so if there's a flaw in that, then it's a flaw inherent in the design of the program, because that's what we're supposed to be trying to do. Now, if it comes down to sounding like a high school argument over, well, my dad can bench press more than your dad, Well, then we're not doing our job very well, and I hope that it didn't come across that way. And I don't think that it did. I don't think we've ever had a show that's quite gone in that direction, and I hope that we never do. And the issue about talking over and all that sort of stuff, that's something that's tough to do. And let me take a 45-second aside here. People who don't do radio for a living, have no idea how hard it is. When you're having a conversation with somebody, normally, not with microphones and it being broadcast to all the corners of the earth or whatever, you're talking over each other all the time. You just don't realize it. You listen particularly to women talk, and it sounds to the male ear like neither one of them ever stopped. They're just taught. But they're catching everything they're saying, body language, eye contact. They're not being rude. That's just how people talk. And it doesn't translate well to radio. So it's a learned skill, learned art, whatever, that you have to get accustomed to. And Jonathan is a gifted pastor, a fantastic preacher. For my money, very godly. Had all the skills to make for a great pastor. And I think he has a lot of inherent talents that would make for a good talk show personality. But he's learning some of the skills of the trade, and one of them is how to communicate with a guest who's in the studio with body language so they know you're paying attention. They know if you disagree or disagree or when you're ready to interject without actually needing to say anything. There's an art to that, and I'm not perfect at it. Only Bob Miller, who's in this room today, out of the three of us, has got this perfected. Well, I control the microphone. And I just want to say, ladies, his name is Troy Skinner. That's with a capital T and a capital S for him saying that women never shut up. Now I'd qualify that by saying to the male ear. It might appear as though. So anyway, all of that aside, that's something that we're all working on. I'm trying to get better at, Jonathan's trying to get better at. And then the other thing is, it's human nature. It's frustrating sometimes when You ask a question, you make a point, and somebody totally ignores the point or ignores the question or tries to twist it in such a way that changes the gist of the question or the point. And you know that they're going to ramble on for another two or three minutes in the wrong direction. And you're like, wait, that is not what I said. I'll give you all the time you want to respond, but at least let's respond to the right issue. And that's a tough line to try to cross. So I think that's part of its human nature. Part of it is getting comfortable in how to make a radio show sound like a good radio show and all of that. The other stuff, I'll leave to you to respond to. Well, it's interesting. One of the things I was going to say is precisely what you were saying there, that I definitely am learning this radio thing. And I think it's very likely that I'm talking over people more than I should. And I think it's good for me to hear that and to know that and to just openly acknowledge it. I don't want to try to browbeat people or be rude in the show, though I think we do with the show want there to be a passionate exchange of ideas, which at times, like you were saying, means that people might throw twists or comments in that if they're not addressed, then you end up getting down the road in the debate. You're not clarifying things that needed to be clarified. I think that's probably the first thing, and that's a very important distinction for us to make with the show as a whole. The second thing just has to do with Buddhism. Sean, the writer of the email, commented that his brother practices both Buddhism and Catholicism, and you know what? I would love to have a show with somebody that does that, because there are some distinctions that I think somebody like that would make, some of which I would agree with, some of which I would significantly disagree with. The difficulty with this particular writer of the email is that he's of the opinion, he's a Buddhist himself, and he's of the opinion that Buddhism is, you know, the way to approach spirituality, or at least it is for him. And that's the problem you and I had with, we had a Zen Buddhist on the show, and we couldn't pin the person down as to what they actually believed. We found ourselves very frustrated. They'd say on the one hand, oh, well, that's exactly like what Christianity is about. Buddhism and Christianity are just like each other. And then we'd try to build off of that, and he'd say, no, Christianity and Buddhism are totally different from one another. And we found ourselves frustrated because you know, because we couldn't get our head around what exactly the Buddhist was trying to describe. And so, inherent in any discussion with a Buddhist is the fact that the Buddhist doesn't believe in reality. He doesn't believe that this table exists. He believes that this is, you know, immaterial and that once he's enlightened, I don't even think that you're sitting there right across the table from me. I think that, you know, that everything doesn't exist and a truly enlightened person is released from all of those things, and as a result, trying to define what exactly that table is or what theological argument somebody's making is extremely exasperating in that context. Once again, we found that to be true with this lady. She was defining certain things, but as she was going along, it was important to cut in and to ask certain questions and to say, well, wait a second. You just said that and you just said that. Somehow we got to ... Either there's a conflict in what you just said or there's not. I totally appreciate, Sean, what you're saying. If you're a Buddhist, I'm not surprised whatsoever that you thought that we were just fighting with one another like little kids. No Buddhist would ever allow themselves to get into that conversation, and when we had a Zen Buddhist on, it was very hard to nail anything down. If your brother is ever in town, I'd say send him over. We'd love to have the conversation with him, and maybe he could enlighten us a little bit. Now, Bob, until these last couple of shows, you haven't been on the show before, so you've had kind of an outsider... Which is, of course, your mistake. No, only kidding. Our loss. That's right, that's right. But you have a bit of an outsider's perspective, and you've listened to the show a few times, I think, on your way to church or whatever. What do you make of the tone? I'm curious. I'm not trying to set you up. I'm curious. Do you think the tone is, we're too easy on people? Do you think that Jonathan and maybe even myself are too hard on people? I think that I can understand where, as Jonathan just said at the end, where he might think that Jonathan was maybe being more, maybe in an attack mode. But I could hear the passion in Jonathan's tone. I could hear what he was saying. I mean, he's a believer. And when somebody necessarily contradicts your beliefs, I think he's a little bit like me, where he's like, look, I gotta defend my beliefs, and what I see is what I believe is wrong, I gotta bring that to light. And I think that somebody could say, well, you know what, that's... And we all have to, as Christians, we have to do that, because somebody will say, well, you're just brow-beating Christianity into this lady, and that's not necessarily the case. It's a passionate response to maybe a passive answer. In fact, we should say that that lady had just told us that most people in her life have felt that she was the arrogant know-it-all. She openly admitted that she tended, because she had three or four PhDs, she'd written a bunch of books. Basically, her whole job in life is to be smart and to know things better than most people around her. She had openly acknowledged a couple times to us that, being so intellectually oriented, she often came across as arrogant to people. And so it's interesting, you know, that in that context, I think whenever you have people who are passionate and think that they've thought something through and come to a conclusion, there's the tendency for us to come across as arrogant and I think it's very valuable to openly admit and acknowledge that that's the case for a show like this. Let me jump on top here, get a word in edgewise now, I'm only kidding. One of the greatest things that I heard about this whole email was the fact that somewhere in San Francisco, they're having debates and religion classes in high schools in San Francisco. I'm sure they're not teaching what I want them to teach, but at least it will give somebody who is a believer in San Francisco the opportunity to debate in high school. And that, to me, and I don't know if it's a private school or not, but whatever it is, it's good to see. Now, to show that you can't please all the people all the time, here's somebody that sent an email, exact same show. Exact same show. And said, Troy, you'll notice it didn't start with Mr. Skinner. Uh-oh, he likes you. Troy, I emailed Frank Mitchell, program director of FMD, blah blah blah, now I'm emailing you. I'm a listener to your program on Sunday mornings before attending my church. He emailed asking, by the way, I'm paraphrasing parts of this, wanting to try to get a tape of a program, which by the way, shortly will become less of an issue for those who are dying to get a tape collection of the Faith Debate. We're going to start making previous shows of the Faith Debate available via podcast on the website. Check back to the website at least once a week, check, and we'll have had significant additions to the content. My goal is to have additional content added to the Faith Debate page every day, but in case I skip a day or two, I know that at least every week if you check in, there'll be significant updates and changes on the website. Anyway, so he's talking about the program from Sunday, January 21st that had the lady atheist on. He said, I believe she was on consecutive Sundays recently. She was. He wanted to play the show. He wanted a tape of it because he wants to play it, and we're working on getting him a copy, by the way. And if you're listening right now, hopefully you already have that copy in your hands. If not, you will have it very soon. It says, I wanted to play it to a small discussion group that attends our church. We're studying the book Heaven, written by Randy Alcorn, which I'm not familiar. Are either of you? I'm familiar with Randy Alcorn. I don't think I've seen that particular group. Anyway, he says, I know our group would be impressed with Jonathan Schweitzer's response to The Lady that more or less ended the program that particular Sunday. And then he has some contact information and that sort of thing. So there's somebody. Heard the exact same show. Yeah, interesting. And I was impressed by you. Sure. but this person's a Christian. They're going to appreciate more what you have to say. The other person is a Buddhist, not likely to appreciate what you have to say so much. Everybody I know that's ever talked about evangelism among Buddhists, especially like Buddhist monks, like people that really practice, will say that it's very hard to have that discussion with a Buddhist monk precisely because they define respect as never disagreeing with somebody or telling somebody else that they're wrong. you know, that that would be the rudest thing that you could do. So to any Buddhist listening to a show like this that is designed to talk about, well, which one is more the truth, which one is better, is gonna come away from the show deeply offended, you know, at every level because it's inherent in Buddhism. In fact, I feel like the tolerance orientation in the United States gets some of its motivation from Buddhism that claims that all religions are okay, you know, they're all a reflection of the same thing and, you know, it's a tolerance orientation that you're never allowed to tell anybody else that you're wrong. And that's precisely why we have the show is because we think that that orientation is poor and bad for our society. We think that our society does better talking about our differences and talking passionately about them because, you know, that's what America is all about. So the Frederick Faith Debate, that's the voice of Jonathan Schweitzer, pastor of Crossroads Valley Chapel, Bob Miller on the panel this week, host of the Morning News Express, and what's the word? An outed Christian. An outed Christian. Outed Christian. Very public. He's out of the closet with his Christianity. And I'm Troy Skinner, and we're going through- At large. Yeah, at large. Troy Skinner at large. You know, that's funny. Why did you say that, by the way? I was just being witty. Oh, because this has nothing to do with anything, but boy, my very first paying job in radio was as a disc jockey at a country and western radio station. Not country, but country and western. We played stuff from the 50s and 60s. And my goal in life wasn't to be a country DJ or a DJ of any sort. I wanted to be a sportscaster at the time. Glad that worked out for you. We'll be getting those scores for you at the end of today's program. So anyway, I convinced the general manager to let me do the sports in the morning. He paid me for being a disc jockey, he let me do the sports in the morning if you're catching my drift. So anyway, I used to tag out my sportscast by saying, and I'm Troy Skinner at large with sports. At large. Did you hear an old air check tape of mine? Where'd that come from? That came from God himself. This is clearly anointed prophecy here. And then the morning disc jockey used to introduce the sports by saying, and here's our very large sportscaster, Roy Skinner. I just want to know, were you larger back then than you are now? Actually, I was thinner. I'm about 20, 25 pounds heavier now than I was then, that's for sure. Larger, getting larger. I put on 10, 15 pounds my first year of marriage, and I've never looked back. Good. Anyway, here's another email. I'm excited to be on the program this coming up week. I'm going to be quoting from the Book of Bob. There you go. Wait a minute. The Book of Bob. From Bob Miller. You can Bobcast that Book of Bob. Now, you had a chance to hear at least one of the shows we did with Alderman Paul Smith. Yes, I did. He was representing his Mormon faith. We have a couple of minutes left. I'm always fascinated to hear how other people think shows went, because Jonathan and I have comments afterwards, and sometimes what we think how the show went is nothing how other people thought the show went. How do you think they came across? Do you think that Jonathan came across even-handed? Do you think he was too soft on them, too hard on them? Do you think that I gave Paul an equal amount of time? Because we get critiqued on this from various circles. Yeah, we're committed to giving equal time. You have to remember, I'm heading to church, so I don't get to listen to a whole lot, but what I heard Seemed like you were fair. I think Paul had enough time to speak. I think he okay. He didn't hear the bad part of the show But I you know, I thought it was a healthy debate Of course, I don't agree with Paul But I thought it was a healthy debate, and it's exactly what the show's supposed to be. It's a roundtable discussion of faith issues, and you have the book that he gets a lot of his beliefs from. He seemed to know a lot of Scripture. He did. And so for him to argue his point, he makes very good points. I was going to try to say something that had a 50-cent word to it, but it's too early in the morning for that. Yes, it is, yes. Bob really only knows $10 words, and he didn't have change to break that 10. So he was trying to dumb it down to a 50-cent word for us, and he just couldn't quite do it. It's a tough dynamic for us. We have those who are on the more evangelical side who sometimes are critical of the show, that we're not hard enough on the non-Christian guests, or that we even let the Christian guests on the show at all, that we give them a forum they have a problem with. Yeah, people give us a hard time about that. And you have those that are more of either other faith traditions or even on the more, I don't mean this pejoratively, but on the more liberal end of the Christian spectrum, who are critical that we browbeat or we're too tough. And it's hard to figure out what that balance is. We're just doing the best we can. Yeah, because the point is, if you're on the side of the ballgame that you're more committed to everybody, everybody's religion is okay, you're going to tend to think that anybody that's saying that somebody's wrong is browbeating or rude or self-righteous, this kind of thing. Well, I think we've got one more show in us for Bob, if Bob's up to it. The Book of Bob. The Book of Bob, recording from the Book of Bob. Thank you, Bob Miller, host of the Morning News Express. on WFMD. Is that bobble-icious? John Switzer at Crossroads Valley Chapel. Thanks to our sponsors, All Shred, Mobile Document Destruction, and Putman Plumbing and Heating. I'm Troy Skinner. Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to check out our new webpage at WFMD.com. Just search until you find the faith debate and click on it. You might even see a big old ugly picture of John Switzer on there. That's right, right next to Troy. But don't let that discourage you. Thanks for listening. God bless.